Druid forms soon(tm)

So, there isn't really anything amazingly interesting going on lately. Unless you're a druid. If you've seen the post on MMOC you know what I'm talking about. New Night Elf bear forms, and Tauren bear forms. Edit - New tauren cats: linky. Edit2 - New night elf cats: linky2. Upon closer inspection vs the old bear you'll notice the following changes: * Sideburns more obviously visible. * More teeth! No kidding. * Four nails per clas instead of three. * Facial hair combed. * Snarl more smooth. * Eyebrows! * Ears modified, tauren get an earring. * Claws have more polygons (vertexes, triangles, you get the idea) * Butt is more rounded. * Texture is less affected by software blurring. (probably a higher resolution) * Tattoos are more pronounced, different colors and part of the texture itself rather than just a cheap paint job. (its very detailed check it out) * The Night elf faces look less like a giant bat, and more like an actual bear. * Eyes look better. Night Elves got a glow. * Wristband and Necklace. * Fur line / ridge on the back is more detailed. * Tauren horns have gotten a different angle. Small things, but a lot better model. I can't quite see the actual structural changes on some of the more important areas, but, allow me to show you how ridiculously BAD the current models are. And seriously they are HORRIFYINGLY BAD. Caps is intentional. Blizzard has admitted these are some of the oldest models in the game, and as stated "badly in need" of an update. Sadly the image at the top of this post probably won't be considered.. Let's look at the bear Angular and creepy from above. The side isn't too bad at least. But, for our star of today... the cat. Cat form This one scares me the most and keeps me awake at night. How on earth can whoever put this together live with himself?! This is what happens when you try to /sit Oh god, that looks totally wrong, disjointed, painful even. What on earth is the bottom half of my cat made of?! Now lets see what happens when that disjointed "move" is completed. What happened here? Our sleek cat is no longer so sleek, but shaped like an hourglass with vertexes protruding from odd angles. He has no butt whatsoever. (Whereas the bear has too much /wink) Hopefully the model update will be implemented soon. But I'm guessing it's scheduled to go live in 3.2.. so that'll be a few months yet. Wintergrasp Finally, a quick tip for Wintergrasp. Or venting frustration if you will. First of all, you can hit two walls at the same time as long as you position your vehicle at the joint between those two walls. Kindly DO so! In short, don't stand in the middle of a wall, stand between two walls and you'll hit both, do double as much damage etc. Please only use this if you are a horde ;) In the below screenshots that would be directly "under" the enemy turret. Not only are you immune to damage from that turret, you'll hit two walls at the same time. Demolishers Secondly, Demolishers are awesome for breaking the final door. Don't be an idiot and rush there if you are riding one, you'll just give the other team an easy kill. Position your vehicle like this: Or this: And, as you can see in the screenshot, you'll be able to damage the door just fine without having to get too close and get zerged to death. I've destroyed many a door in this manner. Another trick with the Demolisher, is to position yourself behind a wall that is 50% broken down. Why? Because with a little maneuvering you can shoot "over" it, and not be seen by the enemy. Meaning you can keep shooting at that damn door for a longer period of time. It's hard to see from this map, but should give you an idea: Finally, although you can easily nuke down turrets from outside the base it's very easy to simply "fly" into the enemy base after the battle has started and kill them from the inside. Or simply log on with a stealth character after the battle has already started. There's an awesome and completely covered spot where you can safely log in/out inside the base. Near the left wall of the eastern workshop inside the base. Use this info well.

JC Nerfed, 3.2 incoming

Jewelcrafting was simply the best profession to have statwise, but it's getting nerfed soon. See here, here and here. So, as I've previously shown in a comparison. Even without factoring in the blue socket / meta gem bonus, Jewelcrafting is worth "33" stat points while most other professions are worth 32 or thereabouts. Meaning it's still the best choice out there, but a lot less than it used to be. We'll have to see how it holds out in the future when we get more access to +20 stat gems. Blacksmithing is on safe grounds either way. While it was a valid change (from my point of view), much mindless crying did ensue. 3.2 Call of the Crusade 3.2 will have a new instance, Crusaders' Coliseum: In order to prepare for a siege on Icecrown Citadel, players will be called by the Argent Crusade to test their mettle in the Coliseum. 5-player, 10-player, and 25-player challenges await inside. What exactly this will entail remains to be seen. I doubt it'll be a very big instance, but perhaps blizzard will surprise us. Further changes Thorns and retribution aura have been changed. Base damage halved. Both Thorns and Ret Aura scale with spellpower, which is not in abundance on tanks. On the other hand, on level 80 classes with spell power they could hit an attacker for 1000 or more damage per hit of just passive damage that doesn't even requrie a button press. That's pretty generous. New zeppelin between Orgrimmar and Thunder Bluff Simply put, every single city aside from Thunder Bluff is connected by a boat or zeppelin. Thunder Bluff has been unique since the latest expansion in that it still requires a run. No, it is not as difficult a run as the old Menethil jog, but it still requires a lengthy trip through over-level, hostile territory for an individual newly made who wants to make use of the facilities in Thunder Bluff. This is good news for all new low level hordies :) Poll ends Closing it a few days early, it's been active long enough :P Did you activate Dual Spec? (Pick 2) * DPS - 65 (45%) * Healing - 36 (25%) * Didn't activate it yet. - 32 (22%) * I want tri-spec T_T - 29 (20%) * Tanking - 28 (19%) * PvP - 24 (16%) * Two almost identical specs. - 20 (13%) * Hybrid - 4 (2%) DPS and Healing seems to be fairly in the lead. Somewhat expected I think. New poll question! : Do you agree with the JC Nerf?

Why Nigeria?

Seriously, why is nigeria such a scammer / spammer paradise? What is so special about that "one" country that the most notorious (and biggest F A I L) scammers originate from there? I honestly have no clue, but, allow me to relate a recent occurrence to you.

So, around the 2nd of January I got my new Dell PC delivered. Dell had a special action running that you got a "free" (yeah right) pocket cam along with it. (See picture on the right) Current market value around 80-100 euros. However... they sent me the pink one. Of all things! Why pink?! Retarded, but anyway...

So, after a while I decided to stick the thing on this country's equivalent of ebay. No bids, no interest. The camera is, to this day still in it's box, unopened. If anyone wants it, let me know and I can give you a sweet price for it. Now, I tried to put it on that site again a few days ago and suddenly it got a bid! 200 euros! o_O

Remember, If something seems too good to be true, it generally is. And such proved to be the case here as well. What sort of moron would honestly bid 200e on something worth 60-80e anyway? Smelling a fail I decided to accept his offer and see what he'd do, whether he'd actually try to scam me, or send money and then revert the offer. You'll have to be a pretty damn good scammer to outwit me. Turns out, you'd have to be an even bigger fail than this scammer to fall for a retarded trick like this.


There you have it, fail from the very first mail. I honestly doubt this guy is a professional scammer due to his lacking english. But I figured what the heck, let's throw the guy a bone and see his reaction. I told him the item was pristine as stated in the auction, without telling him the price again. Any proper bidder would have known what he bid, but this guy obviously goes around all day placing fake bids so it'd only logical his memory won't be too amazing regarding his own actions.



There you have it, suddenly he's offering 400 + 50 in shipping to send the item to Nigeria. Whatever happened to that original 200? If for whatever reason you weren't expecting a scam by this point, the fact that he wants it mailed to Nigeria should set off a hundred alarm bells in your head. He's also asking for my phone number, which I'm obviously NOT going to give him. Trying to see how much I can get him to offer, I tell him to pay for insurance 50e (heck, as long as we're throwing around fictional numbers anyway)


There you have it, his address, or his friend's address. I don't know. If any of you are ever going to Nigeria, please pay the guy a visit and let him know your feelings about people who try to pull jokes like this. At the same time, I got these two mails on my other email:



So, there we have it. A fake Paypal notification with a warning that the payment won't show up until I send him the item. 1/10 for effort since the originating address isn't even actually paypal. And, having logged in my paypal address from the regular bookmark shows that indeed there's no payment at all.

The first mail at least looks "somewhat" like he copy pasted it from an actual paypal mail. The second one, omg. He's just not even trying. I underlined in red the biggest mistakes.



I pity the fools stupid enough to fall for this kind of obvious scam. Aside that, he mailed the "same" thing to my hotmail address. Paypal doesn't even KNOW I have a hotmail. It's rather obvious he's trying to get me to send the item ASAP, and offering a load of money to get people to ignore the mistakes. Also, if you look up clerk.com that site doesn't even exist.




By this point I was getting rather tired of the guy, and decided to let him know he had to pay 19% tax for shipping electronics across another country. As the FAIL scammer he was, he agreed easily.



And he messed up again, sending the paypal notification to my hotmail rather than the email address attached to my paypal account. /fail



I had seen enough by then, and forwarded the entire email conversation to yahoo and paypal.



Thus ends this story.

For now.

Achievement spam

There we go, Crusader zurgat! Total number of points not doing too badly either, but there's people "out there" with over 9000 points already. Sick! So, argent tournament rep farm done. Next on the list is farming badges for the pets. Any alliance want to swap some of theirs for horde pets? WoW Matrix away WoW Matrix was the unofficial followup for WoW Ace Updater, and I've gladly used it for as long as it was working. Described here. But it seems all good and even not-so-good things must come to an end. While the tool did "work", the way in which it did this was heavily frowned upon by the sites that hosted the actual addons. WoW Matrix is leeching their bandwidth after all. As of recently however, WoW UI as well as Curse have been blocking WoW Matrix, and in effect it's been rendered mostly useless. You can still download it from here if you're curious about it, but it won't do much anymore. MMOUI - Minion Introducing MMO UI - Minion. Bit of a weird name, but you'll get used to it eventually. The guys (and girls) from over at WoW Interface saw the need for a better addon updating system and got to work on a proper replacement for the Wow Ace Updater (WAU). They named it the MMOUI Minion. It's nicely described on the WoWHead blog already, but I'll toss you some info on it as well. * It will work on Windows, Mac and Linux. Unlike the piece of shit from Curse. * Beta testing is slated to begin the 17'th of May 2009. Keep an eye out, as that's in 7 days already. Unless of course they pull a "when it's done" trick like blizzard has a tendency. * There is an option for you to have it auto-update your AddOns for you. Unlike that piece of shit from Curse which only offers such a feature for people who PAY for it. And even then, it probably won't work if they do. * There are some advertisements shown in the tool, not unexpected. But, you can remove those if you get the paid version. Unlike that piece of shit from curse however, the free version is fully functional. * The tool will have modules / API / customizable functions and a lot more available for it. So far it sounds a lot better than that PIECE OF SHIT FROM CURSE, so I'll definitely give it a spin later on. Also, in case you're wondering why I'm so negative about curse... Well, the damn thing doesn't work, is putting all the regular features that you'd expect from an updater into the paid only version, requires you to log in to their pissant slow site, and that is, if it even bloody loads at all! So, boycott that junk and send your praises over to the folk from WoW Interface. /cheer! Making a Warcraft Comic in 12 easy steps Cru, from the Cru the dwarf comic has recently uploaded a very useful tutorial for those among you who may wish to make their own web comic. Cru teaches U 2 Comic. * Page 1, Page 2, Page 3. * Page 4, Page 5, Page 6. * Page 7, Page 8, Page 9. * Page 10, Page 11. Step 12 would obviously be, get started already! Arthas book Personally, I'm about 50% done on reading the novel about Arthas. So far it's pretty interesting and it's giving some interesting background information about Jaina and Arthas. It's a quick read, but I find that the background info about most characters isn't really "that" detailed. It's to be expected in a way, but still a shame. The writer put together an interesting story, but is very limited in freedom due to blizzard's censoring. This ensures the book is (probably) accurate in terms of lollore, but means the story will be pretty meaningless and confusing to anyone other than World of Warcraft players. Eggy Death I ran into these little guys on deviant art. So funny! See the artist's page here. Awesome Game Not sure if I ever linked you this game called GemCraft (chapter 1) before, but there's now a "prequel" available called Gemcraft Chapter 0. It's basically the followup of chapter 1, but with a "LOT" more options, replay value, etc. Try it out sometime.

Blog update

/wipes forehead. That was a bit of work, but you can't put it off forever. I've been planning to re-sort the label system for a long time now, and well, the longer you wait the more work it becomes. I merged them down from 54 to only 30. Quite an improvement. Now, with less labels, it'll be easier to find "related" posts, and gives me an excuses to put that top menu up there ^ to some better use. The labels section has been rewritten in the html. This way the whole label list that was previously in the rightmost column could be removed. This is what's left: And, has been implemented into the top menu bar. # 2.3.x (7) # 2.4.x (17) # Advertisements (12) # blizzard (18) # blog (46) # classes (30) # Contests (4) # DPS and Character improvement (14) # Dungeons and Raids (37) # Farming + Gathering (8) # Fun and Comics (30) # Guest posts (3) # Guides (29) # guild (18) # Interface and Addons (5) # Items and Gear (23) # links (42) # Making Gold (13) # Miscellaneous (3) # Other Games (7) # Patches (18) # poll (30) # Professions (27) # ptr (14) # pvp (11) # Quests and Achievements (13) # Rogues and Stealth (33) # Talents and Skills (12) # Technology and Media (30) # The Real World (16) # theorycraft (16) # wotlk (61) As a result, I've got some room available to use for other stuff. So, we'll be having a look at the Palace in the Sky group. It's a group that was initially founded with web comics in mind. They 'pool' a group of advert boxes into one account, and use that to advertise the list of links rather than individual pages. The end result is that hopefully more people will come and visit the site :) Argent Crusade So, that aside. How are you doing on the argent tournament? Blizzard added a whole range of new mounts (that don't look all that much different from existing ones) here, as well as a good six new titles to earn. I'm on 3/5 of the exalted city achievements so far. It's pretty easy, but does take some time and daily quests to get trough. In case you're having trouble doing the champion fights, keep this in mind: * Get the shield up to 3/3 before starting. * Stay close * Melee, strafe away, throw, get close, melee, strafe away, throw, get close, and repeat until target is dead. * Refresh the shield if the opponent gets a lucky / lag shot. Never use the "charge" attack, the opponent will just do the same. Following that tactic you will generally finish with 80-90% of your health left in tact, and 30-40 seconds on your shield. Happy hunting!